The King is Dead, Reblog

As many of you know, Jessica Hoff of All along the Watchtower has become a dear friend of mine through our blogs, a while ago I asked her and her co-writer Chalcedon 451 to select some of my posts from earlier that they would like me to repost. This is one of them.

You all know how much I like history and traditions so when I get to be involved in something historical and very, very Christian it pleases me greatly. Yesterday, Jessica, who is English, did the Pilgrimage to Walsingham, which is known as the Nazareth of England. It is a shrine visited by every English King from Richard I to Henry VIII, whose soldiers destroyed it during the dissolution of the monasteries. In the 1930s a new Anglican church was built and the Slipper Church (which was the last of the Pilgrimage churches) was restored as a Catholic church. For my American readers I note that the first Mass since the Reformation on the Priory grounds was organized on 17 May 1945 by the American forces.

Before this introduction becomes a post of its own, let me get to the point here. In a wonderful gesture that must have confused my stern Lutheran God, Jessica has told me that a candle was lighted for me, yesterday in Walsingham. Obviously there is no way to repay such an honor, other than eternal gratitude, so this post which Jessica and Chalcedon requested to be reposted will have to do as a token of that gratitude. Thank You, Maam, from the bottom of my heart.

The King is Dead

There is a name for what killed the King, it’s called regicide, and it was cold-blooded with malice aforethought, and the perpetrators are to be found in Washington D.C..

The King had a long reign from when a blacksmith in the Lehigh Valley designed a grate that would burn his Grandfather Anthracite, to powering America‘s industrial (and Transportation) Revolution. For within 50 years we went from the pace of a walking man, for all communication, to literally traveling a mile a minute and instantaneous communication. From there we went on to develop the modern world itself, with his Father Bituminous providing an abundant supply of energy, and finally the King, Low Sulfur provided the power to keep the most advanced people in the world lit, comfortable, and moving forward.

For two hundred years he has heated our homes, run our industry, powered our transportation, and even lighted our lives. That will soon end.

Who will take his place? If we are very lucky, petroleum, in the form of natural gas but, I wouldn’t bet on it. Production is rising (and would be rising more except for politics) but will it rise enough and quickly enough? No one really knows.

Solar, geothermal, all this other ‘Green’ claptrap? Not for a hundred years at least, maybe never. Even government loans and subsidies can’t bring it within affordable range.

If we are unlucky there will be no replacement, we will simply regress back to 18th Century or so, watching as thousands of our fellow citizens die of diseases that we have wiped out through technology, or simply starve. This was the world before America, who could (and has) cure diseases while feeding the world. This is the world that King Coal and his acolyte The Free Market wrought.

But the King was murdered mortally wounded this week. Who would do such a thing? Why the court of the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Barack, of course.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found a perfect proxy for coal – the mercury that only coal-fired power plants emit. In December, the EPA issued its 2011 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule, which imposes stringent new controls on power-plant emissions of mercury, acid gases and other hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). According to the EPA, utilities will have to spend $9.6 billion in 2016 alone to comply.

This enormous cost will increase everyone’s power bills. That might make sense if the pollutants subject to the rule posed significant risks to public health. They don’t. The rule is aimed primarily at mercury emissions, but mercury is not a health hazard in the atmosphere. Negative health effects can result when it gets into water and accumulates in the bodies of fish.

Under the proposed rules, new power plants will be required to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of electricity; coal plants average 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt. As Jordan Weissmann writes for theAtlantic, “Natural gas plants already meet this requirement. But if a utility wants to burn coal for electricity, it will need to install carbon capture technology – and that’s really expensive.”

Carbon capture and storage technology allows carbon-dioxide emissions to be stored in the ground instead of being released into the atmosphere. But the technology is, for many coal-energy producers, prohibitively pricey. Even assuming new coal plants are actually built under this regulatory regime, to whom do you think those new expenses will be passed on to? That’s right – energy consumers.

Well, that’s one campaign promise he’s well on the way to keeping. Who gets hurt? The poor, of course. You know those poor downtrodden people who have minimum wage jobs because the ‘Obama Recovery’ is a very bad joke, the welfare recipients who voted overwhelmingly for the Pretender as well as the rest of the populace who can’t be bothered to think beyond their next Big Mac.

It very likely that another coal fired generating station will never be built. Natural Gas production of electricity costs about a third more which is semi affordable but, the Court is warring on it also, so you needn’t expect the huge increases in production that would allow it to replace coal which generates about 60% of our electricity. Do you really think Obama’s Court is going to permit Nuclear Power? Yeah, me neither. That leaves solar, wind, algae, and whatever other gimcrack schemes that overeducated idiots in ivory towers can dream up that mostly drain the Treasury without doing a damn thing to solve any problems, except their self-esteem, of which they already have a surfeit. For instance Michelle Malkin wrote this week about A123 Systems and their dangerous battery packs which we loaned them the money to make.

While President Obama was busy lambasting Big Oil tax breaks on Thursday, yet another one of his environmental welfare recipients (the very kind he wants to redistribute oil subsidies to) was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Who needs to win the Mega Millions lottery? Start a pie-in-the-sky eco-boondoggle, and a half-billion-dollar jackpot ripe for squandering is all yours!

The Solyndra of the week is A123 Systems, an electric vehicle battery company based in Massachusetts. The firm also has battery plants in Michigan, where former Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm once heralded A123 as a federal stimulus “success story.” Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the company headquarters and hailed it as a “great example of how Recovery Act funding is helping American companies.” In addition to nearly $300 million in Obama Recovery Act funds, Granholm kicked in another $135 million in tax credits and subsidies to bribe the company to keep jobs in her state.

How’s the return on government investment? This green dud will have taxpayers seeing red. A123′s official company motto is “Power. Safety. Life.” But the firm’s reality is “Out of power. Endangering safety. Clinging to life.”

Earlier this week, the company announced a recall of malfunctioning battery packs manufactured in Livonia, Mich. A123 makes the products for Fisker, Chevrolet and BMW electric cars. Consumer Reports flagged the potentially hazardous defect caused by faulty calibration earlier this month. The recall will cost upward of $55 million.

A Deutsche Bank analyst wrote: “We no longer have enough confidence that (A123) can raise sufficient capital (without massive equity dilution) and/or continue to augment their book to future business. Recent quality issues may lead to concerns over (A123′s) ability to manufacture with quality at high volumes, potentially leading to customer defections or at least difficulty in procuring new contracts.”

It must be really profitable being a huckster buddy of Obama’s, at least if your name isn’t Tony Resko, who apparently outlived his usefulness.

Finally there is this.

The EPA Wrecking Ball

By Alan Caruba

The Environmental Protection Agency is using its power to advance the objective of the environmental movement to deny Americans access to the energy that sustains the nation’s economy and is using the greatest hoax ever perpetrated, global warming—now called “climate change”—to achieve that goal.

“This standard isn’t the once-and-for-all solution to our environmental challenge,” said Lisa Jackson, the EPA administrator, “but it is an important commonsense step toward tackling the ongoing and very real threat of climate change and protecting the future for generations to come. It will enhance the lives of our children and our children’s children.”

This is a boldfaced lie. Its newest rule is based on the debasement of science that is characterized and embodied in the global warming hoax. It will deprive America of the energy it requires to function.

Since the 1980s the Greens have been telling everyone that carbon dioxide was causing global warming—now called climate change—and warning that CO2 emissions were going to kill everyone in the world if they weren’t dramatically reduced. The ball was put in motion with the United Nations 1997 Kyoto Protocols when many nations agreed to this absurd idea and carried forward by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ever since.

The Environmental Protection Agency was created to clean the nation’s air and water where it was deemed that a hazard existed. Like most noble ideas and most Congressional mandates, the initial language was vague enough to be interpreted to mean anything those in charge wanted it to mean. Add in the global warming hoax and you have the means to destroy the nation.

Now it means that the source of fifty percent of all the electricity generated in the United States is being systematically put out of business and please do not act surprised; that’s exactly what Barack Obama said he intended to do if elected President.

This is evil writ large.

Shutting down utilities that use coal, an energy source the U.S. has in such abundance that it could provide electricity for the next hundreds of years, and ensuring that no new ones are built fits in perfectly with all the Green pipedreams about “renewable” energy. Solar and wind presently provide about two percent of the nation’s electricity and, without government subsidies and mandates requiring their use, they would not exist at all.

And that’s without even talking about all the miners, railroaders, engineers and such that have made coal work so well for us. As an example probably two-thirds of the trains here on the Union Pacific are unit coal trains transiting from the Feather River to power plants all over the country.

You know, I liked the 20th Century and the 21st was showing even better promise as the pace of technological innovation continued its logarithmic rise but, unless we stop these programs that are destructive of our economy, are destructive of our happiness, and finally are destructive of our people and their health we are going to live in one of those historical museums like Dearborn Village or maybe Colonial Williamsburg, but not as a visitor, as full-time residents, knowing nothing else.

A Reminder of Our Heritage

“Every man, who parrots the cry of ‘stand by the President’ without adding the proviso ‘so far as he serves the Republic’ takes an attitude as essentially unmanly as that of any Stuart royalist who championed the doctrine that the King could do no wrong. No self-respecting and intelligent free man could take such an attitude.”

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You’re St. Melito of Sardis!

You have a great love of history and liturgy. You’re attached to the traditions of the ancients, yet you recognize that the old world — great as it was — is passing away. You are loyal to the customs of your family, though you do not hesitate to call family members to account for their sins.